Exploring, eating and writing about good food on Canada's west coast

Happy 2016, all! I'm feeling optimistic about this year and looking forward to lots of great experimental cooking in the coming months. To start 2016 off right, I want to give a huge shout-out to Windset Farms and share my favourite Devour & Conquer Windset Recipes from the past year.

Windset Farms is an innovative, non-GMO greenhouse company using sustainable growing practices, headquartered in British Columbia's Fraser Valley. I've been buying their tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other produce at my local grocery stores for years now, as the quality is always excellent and the flavours and colours are fresh and vibrant, even the coldest winter months. With Canadian greenhouses in Delta and Abbotsford, BC working along with their US greenhouses in Santa Maria, California and Las Vegas, Nevada, Windset Farms produces an on-going harvest of fresh vegetables year-round.

I've been proud to partner with Windset Farms for the past year, and had the pleasure of experimenting with many of their fresh-grown vegetables to create a variety of new vegetable-based recipes. Here are some of my favourite ways to bring more vegetables to the table in unique ways. All recipe titles and photographs are active links to the full recipes and blog posts, so feel free to click through and explore.

This cucumber-based fruit smoothie is filled with frozen blueberries and pineapple, fresh kale and Windset's Fresco Cocktail Cucumbers. Packed with antioxidants, vitamins and detoxifiers with no added sugar, this smoothie is also naturally gluten & dairy free and vegan/vegetarian friendly - not to mention so delicious you'll forget how healthy it is.

I love a good tomato bruschetta, and this Rustic Bruschetta Salad with Parmesan Crisps and homemade Garlic Croutons brings together all the flavours of a classic Bruschetta appetizer in salad form, using Windset's Symphony Tomato Ensemble.

All the flavours of your favourite buffalo wings wrapped up in butter lettuce for these Buffalo Chicken Lettuce Wraps using Windset's Delicato Living Butter Lettuce. Keeps that spicy buffalo sauce off your fingers and your eyes on the game (or the commercials, or the buffet table - everyone enjoys a Superbowl in their own way).

This recipe for Lazy Crock-Pot Mexican Chicken & Peppers is just the thing to slow cook for hours, then warm you up on cold and dark evening. The chicken is seasoned with chorizo sausage and a Mexican fajita-style spice mix, and cooks slowly along with Windset's Sweet Bell Peppers until tender and shreddable.

A hearty Beef-Stuffed Roasted Peppers recipe accompanied by a smooth Tomato Butter Sauce, using Windset's Crescendo Sweet Pointed Peppers and Roma Tomatoes on the Vine. Just the thing to warm up a cold winter evening, with a tribute to cabbage roll flavours in the beef & rice stuffing.